Jacob Melish

Jacob D. Melish received his PhD at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor; he also has a graduate degree from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and a BA from Tulane University, New Orleans. Before coming to UNCO he taught at the University of Cincinnati, the University of Massachusetts Boston, and two private women’s institutions, Simmons College and Wheelock College. His teaching fields are early modern Europe, with a focus on France, England, and the Ottoman Empire; women, men and gender since 1500; the colonial Atlantic world; and France since 1500, among others. His current research projects concern pre-modern Paris, working women and gender relations, law and society, and the social aspects of religion. His book project examines working women’s roles in shaping key areas of men’s world in early modern Paris: informally regulating men’s behavior, managing the family businesses that made up the pre-industrial urban economy, and strategically using their sexuality. He is also finishing an article manuscript on anti-Jewish representations in the cultural images and life of a used-clothes dealer and her colleagues in pre-modern Paris.

He has published in French Historical Studies and has a chapter forthcoming in an edited volume on women and work in early modern France. He has presented at the main meetings of the American Historical Association, Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Society for French Historical Studies, Sixteenth Century Society and Conference, Centre International de Rencontres sur le XVIIème Siècle, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, among others.

Courses he has or will be offering at UNC include Tudor-Stuart England, the Reformation, Europe and Islam, Women and Men in Europe Since 1600, the Enlightenment, France and Empire, and the European history survey, among others. His teaching experience also includes the world history survey and courses on gender and early modern colonialism, the French Revolution, and the Atlantic world, 1500-1800.

Born in the United States, he grew up in Liverpool, England, and has family there and in France.